Forty days after the United States and Israel launched the most ambitious joint strike campaign in the history of the Middle East, Iran is still standing. Its government is still in power. Its ballistic missile programme is intact. Its enriched uranium stockpile - enough for roughly ten nuclear warheads according to senior Israeli military analysts - has not been handed over to anyone. And the Strait of Hormuz, whose closure triggered the worst energy shock in petroleum industry history, is now reopening under terms that effectively give Tehran permanent leverage over one-fifth of global oil supplies. This is not what Israel's prime minister said the war was for.
The Pakistan-brokered ceasefire announced Tuesday by President Trump brought the 38-day campaign of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran to a conditional pause. It also detonated a political crisis inside Israel that may ultimately be more consequential than anything that happened on the battlefield. Opposition leader Yair Lapid - who had vocally supported the war - called the ceasefire "one of the greatest political disasters in all of our history." Former intelligence chiefs have given anonymous briefings describing the outcome as a "strategic blunder." And Netanyahu, the prime minister who spent decades warning of Iran's nuclear ambitions and who championed the campaign that was supposed to end them forever, is now defending a ceasefire that has left every one of those ambitions largely intact.
Netanyahu articulated Israel's war aims with unusual clarity in a televised address in mid-March, delivered two weeks after the start of the campaign. They were: to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and to create "the conditions for the Iranian people so they can remove the cruel regime of tyranny." Neither goal has been achieved, and neither is close to being achieved.
The nuclear question is the starkest failure. Iran still holds approximately 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. That is enough, according to Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in War Studies at King's College London who recently returned from Israel, "for 10 bombs." Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were struck by US and Israeli forces. The damage assessment, according to multiple leaked intelligence analyses, suggests the strikes set the programme back by somewhere between two and five years - not a permanent elimination, not a decommissioning, and absolutely not the "taken care of" framing Trump has now deployed. [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
The regime-change goal fared even worse. Iran's government not only survived 40 days of the most intense air campaign the country has ever experienced - it emerged from the conflict with a stronger internal narrative than it has had in years. The supreme leader was killed on day one, a monumental tactical success that stripped Tehran of its longest-serving leadership in a single strike. Within days, a functioning replacement leadership structure had reconstituted itself around the Supreme National Security Council. The Islamic Republic did not fall. Its hardliners, though angry at the ceasefire terms, have rallied around a government that - in their framing - faced the full military force of the United States and Israel, lost its Supreme Leader, and is still there. That is a powerful survival story, and its power accrues to Tehran, not Tel Aviv.
"Israel and the US had many tactical gains. They won militarily, but, strategically, Iran is the clear victor." - Ahron Bregman, King's College London War Studies, to Al Jazeera
To be precise about what happened: the military campaign against Iran produced tactical results of genuine historical significance. The IDF and US forces killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of strikes, on February 28. They killed Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and the most powerful figure in Tehran after Khamenei's death, in a strike on March 16-17. They struck South Pars, the world's largest natural gas field, causing catastrophic disruption to Iran's energy exports. They achieved control of Iranian airspace to a degree that no foreign military has ever approached. They struck Iran's nuclear infrastructure repeatedly and with precision. [Al Jazeera features, April 8, 2026]
That list is impressive. It is also, in the view of every serious strategic analyst who has publicly assessed the outcome, insufficient. The case for military sufficiency would require that these strikes permanently eliminated Iran's nuclear capability, produced a political transition, and degraded Iran's ability to project power across the region in ways that make Israel measurably safer. None of those things happened. Iran's missile programme, which enabled its retaliation attacks on Israeli territory and Gulf states, is intact. Iran's alliances with regional proxies have not been dissolved. The Strait of Hormuz, now formally operating under a toll regime that gives Tehran economic and strategic leverage over global shipping, represents a new and durable form of Iranian power that did not exist before the war. [BBC analysis, April 8, 2026]
Bregman, who specialises in Israeli military history, offered the sharpest formulation to Al Jazeera: "Iran's decision to block the Hormuz pushed Trump off balance, and he never recovered. Future historians will regard this Iranian decision as the turning point in the war." That framing - which is contested by Israeli government officials but widely accepted in Western strategic analysis circles - inverts the conventional narrative. In this reading, Iran's key decision was not military but economic. By closing the strait, Tehran imposed costs so severe on the global economy that the United States, which had the military capacity to keep striking indefinitely, found itself under pressure to stop. Not from military failure, but from economic and diplomatic exhaustion.
| Israeli War Goal | Status | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons | NOT ACHIEVED | 440kg enriched uranium remains; programme set back 2-5 years, not eliminated |
| Remove Iran's "regime of tyranny" | NOT ACHIEVED | Islamic Republic intact; hardliners claim vindication; new leadership reconstituted |
| Degrade Iran's missile capability | PARTIAL | Some strikes on launch infrastructure; core programme intact; not subject to negotiations |
| End Iranian proxy support to Hezbollah/Gaza | NOT ACHIEVED | Hezbollah continues operating in Lebanon; ceasefire did not address proxy networks |
| Reopen Strait of Hormuz on Western terms | NOT ACHIEVED | Hormuz reopening under Iranian-coordinated toll regime; Iran retains leverage |
Netanyahu released his statement on the ceasefire in English. Not Hebrew - English. Ofer Cassif of the left-wing Hadash party noticed immediately. "I wasn't surprised that the announcement was in English," Cassif told Al Jazeera. "Netanyahu has no interest in talking to the people of Israel. He rarely does and almost never enters the studio." The choice of language, Cassif said, told its own story: Netanyahu was managing an international audience, not accounting for the Israeli public whose sons and daughters have been mobilised, whose northern communities have been evacuated, and who were told this war would end the Iranian nuclear threat forever. [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
Lapid was not measured. The opposition leader - himself a former prime minister who had supported the attack on Iran in unambiguous terms - issued a statement describing the ceasefire as one of the greatest political disasters in Israeli history. He said Israel had not been involved in the negotiations. He said Netanyahu had "failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set." He added that repairing the damage done by "the prime minister's arrogance" would take years. [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
That kind of language, from someone who backed the war, carries more weight than opposition criticism from the Israeli left, which opposed military action throughout. Lapid's critique is not anti-war - it is a specific indictment of execution and outcome. The argument is not that attacking Iran was wrong, but that Netanyahu conducted the campaign without a realistic theory of how it ended, without adequate coordination with the United States on diplomatic objectives, and without a plan for what happened when the military operations failed to produce the political results they were supposed to generate.
Senior coalition partners are re-evaluating their positions. The far-right members of Netanyahu's governing coalition - who had demanded the complete destruction of Iran's nuclear programme as a condition for their continued support - are now confronting a reality in which that did not happen and the prime minister is nonetheless defending the result as a success. That tension is not stable. Israeli political coalitions have collapsed over smaller divergences than the gap between "we will end the nuclear threat forever" and "we damaged some centrifuges and killed the supreme leader but they still have enough enriched uranium for ten bombs." [Multiple Israeli media sources, April 8, 2026]
The ceasefire, as announced by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif - the man who brokered it - included Lebanon. That is what Sharif posted at the moment of announcement: "immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY." It is what Iran's foreign minister understood to be true. It is what Iran's Supreme National Security Council said. And it is not what happened.
Hours after the announcement, the IDF conducted what it described as the largest single wave of air strikes in the Lebanese phase of the conflict. More than 100 targets hit in under ten minutes. Beirut's southern suburbs - dense, civilian, the city's largest residential belt - were struck. Southern Lebanon was struck. The Bekaa Valley was struck. Lebanon's health ministry reported at least 112 dead and 837 wounded. Civil defence put the final count at 254 dead, more than 1,100 wounded. [Al Jazeera, BBC, April 8, 2026]
Trump's White House was unambiguous: Lebanon was not part of the deal. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the exclusion "has been conveyed to all sides." Trump called Lebanon a "separate skirmish." That description - a single word applied to a conflict that has killed over 1,500 people, displaced 1.2 million (one in five of Lebanon's entire population), and left the country's southern tier as a partially occupied Israeli buffer zone - is the kind of framing that tends to define how an administration is judged retrospectively. [BBC Live, April 8, 2026]
The disconnect on Lebanon's status is not merely diplomatic embarrassment. It is a structural flaw in the ceasefire itself. Iran understood the deal to cover Lebanon. Iran's proxies in Iraq declared a two-week cessation of attacks in coordination with the broader truce. If Iran's understanding of the agreement includes Lebanon and Israel's does not, then every Israeli strike on Lebanese territory is, from Tehran's perspective, a violation of the terms to which it agreed. That gap does not get smaller over fourteen days. It gets larger. The Islamabad talks that begin Friday are now carrying the weight of that unresolved contradiction before they even start.
The conventional framing of the ceasefire, as presented by the White House, is that America "won" because it got Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That framing deserves scrutiny.
Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz was the pivot point of the war. Not the assassination of Khamenei - momentous as that was - but the closure. When Tehran shut the strait on March 18, following Israeli strikes on the South Pars gas field, it imposed costs on the global economy that the United States could not politically absorb for long. Oil hit $107 per barrel. The International Energy Agency described the disruption as the worst supply shock in the history of the petroleum industry. US inflation, already elevated, spiked. European manufacturing slowed. India's cooking gas supply - dependent on Gulf LNG - buckled. Somalia reported a hunger crisis exacerbated by fuel costs. The economic pressure was global, and it was not sustainable for any administration that needed to maintain domestic support. [Al Jazeera, BBC, April 8, 2026]
Iran's willingness to absorb 40 days of the most intensive US-Israeli air campaign in modern history while holding that economic leverage - and not releasing it until a deal was struck - is, analytically, a significant strategic achievement. It forced the United States to negotiate. Not on Iran's maximum terms, but on terms that include: safe passage through Hormuz "coordinated with Iran's armed forces" (meaning Iranian oversight is now formalised), a 10-point framework that Iran says includes lifting all sanctions and withdrawing US forces from the region, Trump's acknowledgment on Truth Social that sanctions relief is part of the conversation, and Iran's insistence that its ballistic missile programme is non-negotiable. [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
China and Iran are simultaneously using the Hormuz toll regime - requiring payment in yuan from ships transiting the strait - as a mechanism to advance yuan internationalisation at the expense of the petrodollar. Kenneth Rogoff, economics professor at Harvard and former IMF chief economist, called the dynamic explicitly: "At one level, Iran is aiming to poke its thumb in the United States's eye, adding insult to injury. At another level, Iran is dead serious about preferring yuan to avoid US sanctions and to cultivate its ally, China, which has been moving steadily to redenominate its own trade." [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
For Israel, which has no direct stake in the dollar-yuan dimension but significant stake in the regional balance of power, the Hormuz outcome is specifically worrying. The ceasefire has, in effect, ratified a permanent Iranian presence in the management of the world's most important energy chokepoint. Iran entered this conflict with theoretical leverage over the strait. It exits the ceasefire period with formalised, treaty-adjacent authority over commercial transit. That is a durable strategic asset that will outlast the two-week pause and the Islamabad talks and any subsequent agreement, because it is physically real - the geography is not going anywhere.
Trump said he agreed to the ceasefire "based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan." Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, was "even more profuse in his praise," according to Al Jazeera's coverage. Pakistan has delivered what its foreign policy establishment will describe for decades as the country's most significant diplomatic achievement: brokering a ceasefire between the United States of America and Iran.
The backstory is remarkable. Pakistan had to manage a Shia population of roughly 35-50 million people - 15 to 20 percent of the country's 250 million - watching Iran being bombed, while maintaining its mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia, managing an "open war" against the Afghan Taliban, and absorbing rising fuel costs driven by Hormuz disruptions. When protests erupted in Karachi on March 1 - leading to at least ten deaths as police tried to disperse crowds trying to storm the US consulate - Islamabad walked a genuinely dangerous line. [Al Jazeera features, April 8, 2026]
Pakistan's early condemnation of the US-Israeli strikes proved the key to winning Iranian trust, according to Qamar Cheema, executive director of the Islamabad-based Sanober Institute. "When Pakistan condemned American strikes, that was where Pakistan won over the Iranians as well. This role as a global peacemaker is the result of personal diplomatic investment in Iran and the protection of international law," Cheema told Al Jazeera. Masood Khan, a former Pakistani ambassador to the UN and the US, offered a simpler formulation: "We fit the bill and delivered on all counts. We did not seek strategic opportunism. We earned their trust." [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
The formal talks begin in Islamabad on Friday, April 11. The US delegation is expected to be led by Vice President JD Vance, with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner accompanying. That is a high-level delegation - a signal that the White House is treating this as a genuine diplomatic track, not a procedural exercise. Pakistan hosts. Pakistan mediates. Pakistan gains. Whatever emerges from Islamabad over the coming weeks will have Islamabad's fingerprints on it permanently, and that repositions Pakistan in the global diplomatic hierarchy in ways that will matter long after this crisis is resolved.
Fourteen days is not a long time to resolve a conflict with this many open threads. The parties head to Islamabad carrying the following unresolved contradictions: Iran believes Lebanon is covered by the ceasefire. The US and Israel say it is not. Iran says the 10-point plan - which includes lifting all sanctions, withdrawing US forces from the region, and full compensation for war damages - is the framework for negotiations. Trump says the 10-point plan is "workable" but has hardened on uranium enrichment, telling reporters there will be "no uranium enrichment" in any final deal. Iran says its missile programme is not on the table. The US had demanded in its 15-point March 25 plan that Iran "strictly limit" its ballistic missiles. None of these gaps have been bridged. [Al Jazeera, BBC, April 8, 2026]
Robert Geist Pinfold, a lecturer in international security at King's College London, put it plainly: "Overall, the issue with the ceasefire deal is everyone, as usual, is claiming victory, and there are still continued violations of the ceasefire." He noted that key details remain unclarified, including Lebanon's status. "Israel maintains it will not [be included]. Pakistan maintains that it will." That disagreement, if unresolved, gives Iran a pretext to walk away from Islamabad the moment Israeli strikes kill Lebanese civilians again - which they almost certainly will, since Israel has no stated intention of stopping. [Al Jazeera, April 8, 2026]
For Israel, the Islamabad talks represent a diplomatic process it was not part of and has limited leverage to shape. Netanyahu's government is officially "supporting the US decision" on the ceasefire while conducting strikes on Lebanon that Pakistan says violate it, while Iran says violate it, while the US says are permitted by it. Israel is simultaneously a full belligerent in a regional war and a non-party to the negotiations designed to end it. That is a genuinely strange position for a country whose strategic doctrine has always emphasised independence of action and deterrence. It suggests that in the specific context of US-Iran relations, Israel is now - whatever its military capabilities - a dependent variable rather than an independent actor.
Strategic analysis conducted in the immediate aftermath of a conflict is always provisional. History has a way of revising first verdicts. The Israeli military victories of June 1967, assessed at the time as existential necessities, came to be seen within years as the source of a decades-long occupation with no clear exit. The US campaign in Afghanistan, described in November 2001 as one of the fastest and most decisive military victories in modern history, ended with Kabul returning to Taliban control in August 2021. Military success and strategic outcome are different things, and the gap between them is where the real history lives.
The preliminary verdict on the US-Israel campaign against Iran, as rendered by the analysts with the closest access to the data - Bregman, Pinfold, Featherstone, and dozens of unnamed briefers in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv - is consistent: the tactical achievements were real and historically significant. The strategic outcome did not match the stated goals. Iran is not nuclear-disarmed. Its government has not fallen. Its proxy network has not been dismantled. Its control over the Strait of Hormuz has been formalised rather than broken. The ceasefire terms, however contested their specifics, were driven more by economic pressure on the United States than by military defeat of Iran.
For Netanyahu, that verdict is politically devastating regardless of what happens in Islamabad. He spent three decades positioning himself as the man who understood Iran better than anyone, who would never allow its nuclear programme to reach fruition, and who would not rest until the Islamic Republic was removed as an existential threat to Israel. He launched a campaign that history will record as having killed Iran's Supreme Leader, destroyed major military infrastructure, and sent the most powerful air force in the region's history deep into Iranian airspace repeatedly and with near-impunity. And Iran is still there. Its uranium is still enriched. Its leadership is still governing. Its missiles are still aimed at Tel Aviv.
That is the paradox at the heart of Israel's position as the ceasefire takes hold: it was the party most responsible for escalating the conflict to its current scale, it achieved military results no other country could have achieved, and it is now watching a deal negotiated without it potentially constrain the options that military success was supposed to unlock. Opposition leader Lapid's word for it - "disaster" - may be operatically strong. But the strategic reality it gestures toward is not wrong.
The fourteen days begin now. Islamabad is waiting. Lebanon is still burning. And somewhere in Iran, 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity is waiting too - for whatever comes next.
Sources: Al Jazeera (multiple reports, April 8, 2026), BBC News (multiple reports, April 8, 2026), BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen analysis, AP News (April 8, 2026). All quotes attributed to named sources as published. Death toll figures are confirmed minimums at time of publication; actual totals are higher. This article does not include speculation beyond what named analysts have stated on record.
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